Bookplanet: that miscellany guy

Ben Schott’s Pursuit of Knowledge, the Unusual and Useless – by CHARLES McGRATH

A diagram of Ben Schott’s mind would resemble a photograph of what the British call a box room: a storage area for stuff no one knows what to do with. A spectacularly cluttered box room, in this case, jammed with cartons and filing cabinets randomly stuffed with sublimely useless information.

On the floor, for example, is a box of bumper stickers (“Fishermen Do It With Their Flies Down,” “Archers Do It with a Quiver”), and taped to the wall above it is a chart of international washing symbols, a guide to understanding cattle brands and a checklist of interesting new words, including “muffin top” (the roll of fat sticking up from too-tight jeans). Lists of cloud types (with pictures) and of wine-bottle sizes are on a shelf, underneath the list of Elizabeth Taylor ’s husbands and next to the little chart explaining that the average $20 bill lasts for two years, or roughly as long as a field mouse, while the typical coin has the lifespan of a hippopotamus.

The difference between a hypnagogic jerk while sleeping and a hypnopompic one? That’s in the medical folder, along with a note about the rise in “BlackBerry thumb” injuries, one shelf over from the Oscars drawer, which includes lists of not just all the winners and what they said but also a description of the contents of last year’s swag bags. The naughty bits are in a loose-leaf binder with a plain paper cover: a list of famous streakers, a country-by-country breakdown of people’s average number of sexual partners, the Bristol scale for evaluating stool samples.

Mr. Schott, who has actually compiled all these facts, and thousands more just like them, is the author and assembler of “Schott’s Original Miscellany,” a slim little volume or “snapper-up of unconsidered trifles,” as he called it, that became a surprise best seller when Bloomsbury published it in Britain in 2002. It was followed in 2004 by “Schott’s Food and Drink Miscellany” (which included all the words to the Chiquita banana song) and, a year later, by “Schott’s Sporting, Gaming & Idling Miscellany” (entries on both navel-gazing and Pac-Man).

In 2005 Mr. Schott produced his first “Almanac,” which differed from the “Miscellany” books both in size and by including a certain amount of information that had genuine practical value, or was at least instructive (population figures, election results and the like) instead of just odd. This month Bloomsbury is bringing out a second, heavily revised edition of the British “Almanac,” along with a brand-new American edition (the “Miscellany” volumes have also been adapted somewhat to appeal to an American audience), while Mr. Schott is also supervising the publication of a German edition. Though only 32, he has already created a vast empire of informational flotsam and jetsam.

The New Statesman named the first almanac Book of the Year in 2005, and in a review this September in Library Journal, Michael Dashkin wrote that Mr. Schott was “working toward creating a new type of almanac, one that recognizes each year past as people are likely to actually remember it: as a mix of both trivial and significant events,” the serious and the footnote, “simultaneously and in succession.”

The Schott volumes are all elegantly designed and slightly old-fashioned-looking, like Mr. Schott himself, who wears wire-rim spectacles and has a center-parted, Hugh Grantish sort of haircut. Mr. Schott does all the typesetting himself and tries to make every paragraph end flush right. Off the page, he talks much the same way — very fast, in perfectly turned paragraphs that cover a great deal of ground before landing on an emphatic point.

In New York recently, both to promote his books and to visit his girlfriend, who is American, he explained that the empire began by accident while he was working as a freelance photographer in London. It was his custom every year to send a Christmas card to his various clients — “just to remind them who I was,” he said — and in 2002 he decided to send a little photographic reference booklet instead.

But he quickly grew bored compiling data about lenses and the like and instead began tossing in things like the 18th-century dueling code, Isaac Asimov’s Laws of Robotics and a chunk of “Hamlet” translated into pig Latin. This first “Miscellany,” privately printed in an edition of just 50 copies, became such a hit among his friends that it soon attracted the attention of Bloomsbury, and then readers all over the country.

“The impulse was quite selfish, really,” he said of his early efforts. “I was writing to satisfy myself. It wasn’t so much what do readers want to know, as what do I want to know. What do I think is unlikely or amusing or new.” He added: “I really like doing it. There’s real metaphorical joy in juxtaposition. I think it’s quite funny to talk about Paris Hilton , for example, in the same typeface that Ben Franklin might have used.”

The difference between the almanacs and the “Miscellany” books, he said, is that the almanacs are much more serious. “They use the same mind-set,” he explained, “but the miscellanies were frothy and fun, sort of magazinelike in their organization of ephemeral data. The almanac is an entirely different proposition. The almanacs really are a record of the year, and they try to approach the year’s news in a way that’s new.”

Some entries he is particularly proud of in the 2007 edition, which came out this month, are a two-page discussion of the language of detention and interrogation, pointing out, for example, that “internal nutrition” is the American military’s euphemism for force-feeding; a piece on James Frey and “truthiness”; and a biographical sketch of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad , the president of Iran.

“I rewrote that one several times,” he said. “I kept adding, tweaking and compressing. I read perhaps 50,000 words to get 800, and I was very pleased when I discovered that in 2005 Ahmadinejad was a finalist in the World Mayor competition, along with Mayor Bloomberg . That was something that just had to go in.”

Mr. Schott does not consider this, or any other of his oddball facts, to be trivia. “I hate trivia,” he said, “and I’ve never been interested in trivia books. Trivia is competitive; it’s ‘I know this and you don’t.’ I think what I’m doing is more inclusive. It’s more about sharing information. So it’s not so much about, say, who won the Super Bowl in such and such a year as what’s engraved on the Super Bowl trophy. Trivia books are written by people who are obsessed, and I wouldn’t want to read any of them.”